Westminster Hall

Thursday 19th March 2026 Westminster Hall

Thursday 19 March 2026

[Dame Siobhain McDonagh in the Chair]

Northern Ireland: Legacy of the Past

Thursday 19th March 2026 Westminster Hall

13:30

[Dame Siobhain McDonagh (in the Chair)]

I remind Members that they should bob if they wish to be called in the debate. I also ask you to be mindful about issues of sub judice; we have been given some flexibility by the Speaker, but I urge you to err on the side of caution when referring to ongoing cases.

[Tonia Antoniazzi (Gower) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Second Report of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, The Government’s new approach to addressing the legacy of the past in Northern Ireland, HC 586, and the Government response, HC 1716.

It is a privilege, as always, to serve under your chairship, Dame Siobhain, and I am grateful to the Liaison Committee for allocating time for the debate. We launched our inquiry in December 2024, and it stretched across 2025, culminating in the publication of our report shortly before Christmas. Alongside receiving almost 80 pieces of written evidence, we held eight evidence sessions with representatives of victims and survivors, veterans, retired police officers and human rights groups. We also heard twice from the Secretary of State. Importantly, we visited Northern Ireland several times to hear at first hand from people directly and indirectly affected by the troubles.

As a cross-party group, we recognise the significance of raising our concerns with a unified voice. As I said during my statement on the Floor of the House when we published this report, I am deeply appreciative of my colleagues’ collaborative spirit in shaping a report built on consensus. It is a serious and comprehensive piece of work, engaging meaningfully with all communities and demonstrating a strong cross-party consensus on outstanding issues of concern and specific provisions in the Bill that require amendment. Our hope is that the level of detail contained in our report will help to shape and inform the parameters of debate in this House and beyond across a wide range of issues. Although the Government provided a detailed response at the end of January, for which we are grateful, a number of important matters remain outstanding, and this debate offers an opportunity to explore some of those further.

I will start with resourcing. Beginning with the very foundation of the legacy process, my Committee repeatedly heard serious concerns about resourcing, which we set out in detail in the report. Put simply, no amount of reform, good will or political momentum will deliver truth or justice if the necessary funding is not in place for investigative bodies or those responsible for information disclosure. Even the current legacy investigation body, the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery, pointed to concerns about sustainable financing going forward, given the increase in demand for its services—an increase that we hope will only continue under the new legacy commission. If the commission is to receive relevant information in a timely manner, the resourcing of organisations such as the Police Service of Northern Ireland also needs to be considered, given the new demands on them to retrieve and categorise their records.

However, the Government’s response does not fully address the concerns we raised. Despite the commission being given new responsibilities through the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill, the Government have not updated the initial funding allocation of £250 million following the passage of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023. We put that to the Secretary of State when he appeared before my Committee earlier this month, and he acknowledged that further discussions will need to take place with the Treasury about the funding of the commission. Those conversations need to happen now.

Moreover, the Government state that funding for the PSNI is a matter for the Department of Justice and that it is for the Northern Ireland Executive to consider how and where they allocate funding. However, the Chief Constable of the PSNI told us in January:

“I get sent by the Secretary of State to the Executive, and by the Executive to the Secretary of State. The Executive will say, ‘This is Westminster-related’ and Westminster will say, ‘We give a significant grant to the Executive. It is for them to pay for this.’ I am caught between the two”.

That is clearly an issue that needs to be addressed.

On the requirement for bodies such as the PSNI to classify documents as sensitive or prejudicial before transferring them to the legacy commission, the Chief Constable also told us that, alongside that being logistically and financially burdensome, there are severe implications for trust and confidence in the PSNI. Again, the Government told us that the question of funding for the PSNI and other devolved organisations is a matter for the Northern Ireland Executive, and that those organisations are best placed to identify sensitive material. However, Operation Kenova did not undertake such a predetermined assessment of legacy materials. I therefore reiterate our call for the Government to reassess the current financial envelope and to consider the wider implications of their reforms, particularly the substantial and currently underfunded administrative burdens they place on organisations such as the PSNI, which are already under significant pressure to deliver core services in the present, while also addressing the past.

On victims, financial resourcing may form the foundation of the legacy process, but victims and survivors unquestionably sit at its heart. We heard a range of concerns about how the new approach will operate in practice for them. For instance, on the proposed victims and survivors advisory group under the proposed legacy commission, questions have been raised about its membership, the method of appointment to it and the risk of it duplicating the important work already undertaken by the victims forum in Northern Ireland. I welcome the fact that the Government commit to complementing the work of existing groups, but we await further information regarding the composition and operation of this new group.

The Northern Ireland Commissioner for Victims and Survivors, Joe McVey, recently expressed concerns that the debate on legacy legislation had been reduced to a false dichotomy of “veterans versus victims”. His warning is important, and I encourage us all to bear it firmly in mind as we move forward.

On veterans, as I said at the outset, we took evidence from veterans’ representatives throughout our inquiry. The Northern Ireland Veterans Commissioner, whom we heard from twice, told us late last year that the Government had been listening to veterans’ concerns “to an extent”, but said that the proposals were not really “protections” for veterans so much as safeguards for all witnesses. Therefore, we concluded that in packaging these as protections, rather than as safeguards available to all, the Government risk undermining trust in this process among the very groups—veterans and others—in which they hope to instil confidence.

In response to us, the Government acknowledge the concerns that measures may not go far enough for many. They add that they are in active consultation with veterans on further steps, emphasising that any additional proposals must be “practically deliverable” and compliant with human rights obligations. I welcome the fact that the Government are listening, but we still await the detail of further measures before we can make a proper assessment.

On the structures proposed to address legacy, our report highlights several areas of concern. Owing to time, I will concentrate on some overarching ones, namely investigations, inquests, and information disclosure. On investigations and the question of who may request one, we heard from many stakeholders that the Bill’s narrow definition of a close family member risks excluding relatives who have often been central to pursuing answers, sometimes for decades after the events in question. Because the trauma is often carried from one generation to the next, our legislation must be designed with an awareness of these long-term and cross-generational effects.

Organisations including the ICRIR have urged the Government to broaden the definition of a close family member. In response to our report, however, the Government maintain that their current approach is “balanced”. None the less, they acknowledge that views differ on the matter, and have committed to continued engagement and careful consideration of those perspectives. Again, I gently encourage the Government to revisit the definition. We heard similar concerns regarding the rigidity and exclusivity of the list in the Bill stipulating what is considered

“serious physical or mental harm”.

On inquests, the Government’s plan for an enhanced inquisitorial mechanism through the legacy commission is seen by some as an improvement on the system introduced by the 2023 Act, but concerns persist, including regarding why judges are to be appointed by Ministers, rather than through the Northern Ireland Judicial Appointments Commission. The Government reject the call for appointments to be routed through the commission, arguing that their approach is consistent with that for appointing inquiry chairs under the Inquiries Act 2005 and making many other public appointments.

Information disclosure has been and remains one of the more significant issues with legacy policy. The troubles Bill assigns the Government a new role in balancing information disclosure with national security—something that Ministers did not undertake under previous legacy measures before the 2023 Act or with Operation Kenova. Our report highlights concerns about trust, appeal rights and how this provision will operate in practice. It is clear from the Government’s response that the proposals on information disclosure will not be revisited. That is likely to concern those who argue that retaining the so-called ministerial veto over what is disclosed presents a serious challenge to the Bill’s overall architecture and risks undermining trust and confidence.

[Claire Hanna (Belfast South and Mid Down) (SDLP)]

I thank the hon. Member for all her efforts on behalf of victims of the troubles and others. This is a chance to put in place accountability mechanisms that we should have put in place decades ago, particularly for those who do not have a judicial pathway. Families in Derry know what happened in their city on Bloody Sunday, regardless of a verdict. IRA victims know what directing terrorism looks like—the explaining away, the casualness with life—regardless of a judicial process.

Does the hon. Member agree that legislation alone will not get us to truth and a reconciled future, and that this must be an opportunity for those who created victims to step forward, bravely, to give that long overdue accountability: for the UK Government to accept that they compromised key human rights protections and at times colluded with paramilitaries; for loyalist paramilitaries to accept that their war was with innocent Catholics; and for the IRA to step up and acknowledge their decades of coercion of communities, and their casualness with human lives—in seeking to achieve an outcome that could never have been achieved in any way other than democratically?

[Tonia Antoniazzi]

I thank the hon. Member for the work she does and the perspective she brings to the Committee, and I agree that this is a matter of building trust and confidence and building a better future across these islands. That requires everybody to step up.

We noted a range of concerns in our report regarding the role of the Irish Government, including in relation to the timeline for equivalent legislation and information on the proposed legacy unit in the Garda. The Government response offers some welcome clarification. It confirms that the legacy unit is now operational and that the Irish Government intend to publish the necessary legislation to facilitate co-operation in either April or May this year. However, actions will matter far more than assurances, and we now await the practical outworkings of those commitments.

Finally, we know and respect the fact that, for some, reconciliation may be impossible. For others, it could be the basis of a better future. My Committee will soon begin an inquiry that explores that in detail. The Government’s response did not fully address the concerns we set out in that section of our report, particularly those relating to part 4 of the 2023 Act. We will use our forthcoming inquiry into reconciliation to continue pressing these questions.

We await the next stage of the troubles Bill, when we will all have the opportunity to put those who carry the legacy of the past at the heart of a new approach for the future. We owe it to them to get it right.

13:44

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I would like to start by referring to the intervention of the hon. Member for Belfast South and Mid Down (Claire Hanna), who is sadly no longer in her place. She talked about people stepping forward and speaking the truth. I believe that the Government’s new approach makes that less, rather than more, likely to happen. In their response to the Select Committee report, the Government speak in disparaging terms about the immunity provisions that the previous Conservative Government laid down; those immunity provisions are described as an affront to democracy. I do not believe that is true at all. It is not true any more than claiming that what happened in South Africa, when Nelson Mandela sought to heal that society, was an affront to their new democracy.

[Leigh Ingham (Stafford) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Member give way?

[Sir Julian Lewis]

I would like to make a little progress first, then I certainly will. I chaired the Defence Committee when we produced a report that recommended the combination of a statute of limitation with a truth recovery process as the best way to proceed. That report took evidence, as I have mentioned many times, from four eminent professors of law. They pointed out that that recommendation was a perfectly legal way to proceed, provided that, if immunities were introduced, they would be brought in for everybody, and provided that the matters concerned would be properly investigated. That investigation could consist of a truth recovery process; it did not have to involve prosecuting people after the investigations had taken place. Some of us have been very concerned about the malicious and vexatious prosecution of service personnel.

If the idea is, on the one hand, to rule out the vexatious pursuit of service personnel and, on the other hand, to heal society by allowing people who suffered in the troubles to find out the truth, then the package of a statute of limitation coupled with a truth recovery process seemed ideal. I cannot quite understand why the Government, and those who support their approach of reopening all those investigations, seem to think that their approach will lead to effective truth recovery. How much more likely is it that people will come forward and tell the truth when they know that they could be incriminating themselves because the Government have reopened that lethal can of worms? That compares with a situation inherent in the original package: by giving everybody immunity, people could then come forward and tell the truth without any fear of adverse consequences to themselves.

The other objection that is made, which I see spelled out explicitly in the Government’s response to the report, is that it is insulting to put everybody on the same level—that it is putting terrorists, service personnel and security forces on the same level. I have pointed out on countless occasions—and never heard a convincing refutation of this—that that ship has already sailed. The Northern Ireland (Sentences) Act 1998 laid down that if anyone is convicted, even of the most appalling atrocities—murders, tortures, rape, you name it—in relation to the troubles, they will not actually serve more than two years in jail. Why does it say that for everyone? Because the law has to be impartial. Just because the law applies impartially to service personnel and terrorists alike does not mean that it draws a moral equivalence between them, and neither did the package here. Its purpose was to give immunity to stop vexatious prosecutions and to enable the truth recovery process to allow the victims to find out what had happened.

A third point that has been put forward is: “Well, they want justice.” But in order to get justice, there has to be a realistic prospect of securing convictions. Even in the case of Bloody Sunday, where we would have thought there was the maximum chance of securing convictions, no conviction was secured. So why do people want to reopen all the prosecutions of service personnel? The answer is that it is not because they expect to get convictions, but because they want to rewrite history and put service personnel through the trauma of being tried, investigated and pursued, even though it is overwhelmingly unlikely that they will be convicted of anything. As has been said before, and deserves to be said again, the punishment is the process, not the actual conviction at the end of that process, which would not be obtained.

I appreciate that the Government have a mandate to try this approach, and I have to respect that. I hope that they will be proven right, and that we on the Opposition Benches will be proven wrong, but somehow I do not think so. It does not help for the Government to insult those of us who tried genuinely to put forward a combination of measures that we were told was legal by four professors of law—a package with immunity for everyone on the one hand, and a truth recovery process to fulfil the obligation to investigate on the other. That package would have been far more likely to lead to reconciliation and the recovery of truth, and to avoid the vexatious pursuit of brave service and security personnel. The Government cannot say that they have not been warned.

13:52

[Fleur Anderson (Putney) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dame Siobhain; I wish you a happy St Patrick’s day. I thank the Chair of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi), for securing this debate and choosing this topic, and I commend her and the Committee for their solid work. Their useful report brings together many different aspects of the Government’s work on this issue, and gave a platform to so many victims, organisations and voices that are often not heard in this place to talk about the impact it has on them, what they think about the current work and what they hope for in future.

This Friday is the anniversary of the 1993 Warrington bombing, when Tim Parry and Johnathan Ball—two children—were killed and 54 people were injured. Not a week goes by, in Northern Ireland and elsewhere, when we do not remember the victims. They are the people we should have in our minds when we talk about the troubles, and about legacy and reconciliation. Secretary of States do not often come to Westminster Hall, so I welcome the presence of the Secretary of State, who I know has taken a personal interest in righting the wrongs of the previous Government’s legislation, and in what that can do for society in Northern Ireland, both now and for future generations.

It is important to remember what this is fundamentally about; I could see that it was on the minds of all Committee members throughout the inquiry. More than 3,500 people, across Northern Ireland and in towns, cities and military barracks across England, died in the troubles. They included nearly 2,000 civilians and more than 1,100 members of our security forces. Nearly a third of those deaths remain unsolved, and a great many victims and families, some of whom I had the privilege of meeting when I was a Minister, are still seeking answers. Their questions remain with me. I will never forget sitting in the WAVE Trauma Centre in Belfast and talking to victims, who, so many years later, have so many questions and just want to know what happened to their loved ones.

[Alex Ballinger (Halesowen) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is delivering an excellent speech. Does she recognise the fact that there are also 200 service families among those victims who are seeking answers, and that the Bill will help to address that issue at the same time?

[Fleur Anderson]

I absolutely agree, and my hon. Friend makes a very good point: this also includes service families. No matter what family someone comes from, it is a huge loss. These are people missing from family tables, about whom there are still questions, and it is a trauma not to know what happened—that is what this legacy legislation aims to resolve. We are so many years on, and there is so much investigating yet to do. I understand that many people simply want to know how their loved ones died.

The ICRIR is taking forward 100 investigations, some of which Peter Sheridan listed in his evidence to the Committee. Those include the deaths of Alexander Millar in 1975; Seamus Bradley, a 19-year-old; Rory O’Kelly in 1977; Kathleen O’Hagan in August 1994, who was seven months’ pregnant, and her baby also died in that attack; James and Ellen Sefton in 1990; and Judge Rory Conaghan in 1974. Those are just some of the people who died—their families have questions, and they are being investigated by the ICRIR.

The commission’s caseload also includes the 1974 Guildford pub bombings, the 1974 M62 coach bombing, the 1976 Kingsmill massacre, and the 1979 Warrenpoint massacre, which was the deadliest attack on British forces during the troubles. We must ensure that those investigations can progress and deliver answers for families, and that all communities can have confidence in the commission, as trust was also a key element of the evidence given in the report.

The last Government’s legacy Act had no support in Northern Ireland, and it is clear why that was the case. It shut down the right of individuals to pursue a civil case, whether against the state or perpetrators of terrorism. It cruelly stopped a number of inquests midway through, and it ended over 1,000 police investigations in Northern Ireland and England, including those into the deaths of more than 200 UK service personnel, as my hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen (Alex Ballinger) highlighted.

The Act was also widely opposed in Northern Ireland by political parties and victims and families. In November 2025, Sandra Peake—the chief executive of the WAVE Trauma Centre—wrote to all MPs, and she also gave very powerful evidence to the Committee for the report. In her letter to MPs, Sandra said:

“The then Government wanted to draw a veil over the past but there isn’t a veil thick enough to hide the blood and bones of murdered loved ones or to muffle the cries of their families.”

The arbitrary ending of troubles-related inquests, and closing the civil action route to justice, confirmed the belief that the interests of victims were not only not on the agenda, but had not even made it into “Any other business”.

[Leigh Ingham]

I, too, met victims at the WAVE centre when I was on the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee. When I read the letter that my hon. Friend just mentioned, this comment really resonated with me:

“Whatever the then Government’s intention, the result would have been that terrorists who carried out the most egregious crimes imaginable would be able to walk free if they told their story”.

They felt like that was too much, so does my hon. Friend agree that the Government are right to address this issue for victims who have come forward?

[Fleur Anderson]

I absolutely agree; it was just too much even to ask or encourage more people to come forward—if they did come forward, there would be no justice. The families of victims often see those people in their local supermarket; they are living in their communities, but the families know that there is no hope of them ever having justice. That is too painful to contemplate.

Like the report, I welcome the fact that the Government have taken a very different approach. I know that the Secretary of State engaged widely on the drafting of the Bill with victims’ groups, families, veterans and other affected parties, and I was pleased to play a part in those discussions. The troubles Bill will restore civil cases and enable the resumption of halted inquests. It will mean that legacy cases are dealt with sensitively and efficiently through a reformed legacy commission, with the fullest possible disclosure of information to families. Rather than making false promises to our veterans, as the legacy Act did, the Bill will put in place six genuine protections for any veteran who is asked to give information, and nobody who carried out acts of terrorism will be given immunity.

We should be clear that it was terrorists—the IRA, the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Irish National Liberation Army and the Ulster Defence Association—who were responsible for the vast majority of deaths during the troubles. It is right that where there is evidence of criminality by anyone, those responsible should be held to account. Frankly, it is shocking that many Opposition Members disagree and would prefer to grant immunity to those who carried out the most heinous acts of terrorism on UK soil.

The Government agreed information-sharing commitments with the Irish authorities under the joint framework announced in September. I welcome the fact that the Select Committee visited Ireland before and during the compilation of the report. The agreement is unprecedented and could be hugely significant in enabling answers to be found for families once the new legacy commission is established.

I am glad that the report highlights the powers of the Secretary of State, the definition of a family member, and the need to listen to victims, listen again and keep listening. These are people who have lost trust in the system. Slowly but surely—through the Government’s actions and the actions of organisations such as the South East Fermanagh Foundation, WAVE and so many others working in mental health across Northern Ireland—the trust of families has been built up. But they will need to see good outcomes.

I welcome the increased funding for the commission and the PSNI, and the reiteration of the need for speed in this work. As has been pointed out many times, many of the family members are now elderly. They are seeing out the end of their days and just want the answers they seek in time.

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech, and she was an excellent Minister in her own right. Will she join me in paying tribute to Councillor Tommy Judge, who has been the Labour councillor for Sharston ward in my constituency for many years, and who was a victim of the 1974 bus bomb? He is standing down after many years of public service, but he will carry that with him, in his retirement, to the end.

[Fleur Anderson]

I thank my hon. Friend for mentioning Tommy Judge, the work he has done and all that he has lived with throughout his life. My hon. Friend and I have met many other people across England who are working to support victims and survivors in Great Britain, as well as in Northern Ireland.

The report ends on a cliffhanger. It ends by talking about wider reconciliation, which is very important, because the legacy legislation is just part of a piece of wider work that needs to be done that is important for reconciliation. When I have been to Northern Ireland, I have asked many times: “What is reconciliation? What does it mean? What will be the outcome? What will it look like?” It means different things to different people. Some people do not want reconciliation; for some people, reconciliation means answers; for some people, it means the ability to live together in a community peacefully; and for some people, it means good jobs, education and opportunities, and hope for the future.

With the world watching the peace process in Northern Ireland, this work could not be more important. It is a beacon of hope for people in other conflicts around the world, who look to Northern Ireland and say, “It has been possible in Northern Ireland,” and who look to the ways in which we continue to build that peace, bit by bit. It is hard, and we are seeing how hard it is, but the ultimate aim must be for communities to be able to live and thrive peacefully together, and to reduce the generational trauma—to reduce the amount that is passed down to future generations.

I hope that future Select Committee reports will look at other aspects of reconciliation, including integrated education, which is an absolutely necessary part of bringing together communities, especially young for people. Just living and working together in a school all the time is so important, as has been reiterated to me so many times by parents and peacemakers in Northern Ireland. I am sure the Committee will consider that aspect too.

Having made that recommendation for future reports, I congratulate the Committee on the report we are debating, on the work the Committee has done, and on how influential I am sure the report will be on the work done not only by the Government but by many organisations and people across Northern Ireland.

14:04

[Robin Swann (South Antrim) (UUP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dame Siobhain. I congratulate the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee on bringing forward the report, and the Chair, the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi), on the way she has stewarded the debate and taken evidence from so many groups. Bringing forward a unanimous report on such a delicate issue in Northern Ireland is testament to all those who were involved and to those who gave evidence. It is a very difficult issue, because it is still very raw in Northern Ireland.

On this day in 1988, two British Army corporals, Derek Wood and David Howes, were attacked, beaten, abused and then shot because they happened to drive into the middle of a Provisional IRA funeral in Belfast. I was a teenager at the time, and I remember watching the reports on television and the brutality of the attack—the seemingly unwarranted deaths of two serving officers in Northern Ireland. That is where the troubles Bill does a disservice to some of our veterans with regard to how they served in Northern Ireland and how they are now being treated.

The concerns of veterans have been touched on many times and are referenced in the report, especially in the six promised protections for Northern Ireland veterans. The Secretary of State knows well that we have had many debates in which those specific protections have been highlighted and exposed as being there for all, not specifically for veterans, as detailed in the wording of the Bill. Words are fine, but unless they are on the face of the legislation, they can be lost, misinterpreted, repealed or even weakened in the interpretation as the Bill goes forward, and even through the judiciary.

I thank the House for allowing this debate on the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee’s reflections on the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill, because we have not yet had the opportunity to do so in the main Chamber. When the remedial order came before the House earlier this year, we were given the impression that the troubles Bill was only days or weeks away. Yet the Leader of the House today gave indications of next week’s business, and we still have no sight of when the Bill will reach Committee stage, so that the Committee of the whole House can delve into what it will mean for victims, veterans and Northern Ireland society alike. That is why this debate is important. In that regard, I am disappointed by the absence of some Northern Ireland MPs, because we asked for this opportunity to debate the detail of the Bill and they have not taken the opportunity to be here today. I understand that others have other commitments.

A remedial order—I think the hon. Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson) said it is an unusual type of legislation, seldom used—was brought forward in January.

[Alex Ballinger]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for being so sensitive in his speech. He mentions the remedial order that does away with the immunity scheme set up by the last Government; does he accept that that scheme was never actually in place, because it was struck down by the courts in Northern Ireland? The remedial order is really just a tidying-up exercise, rather than changing anything while the new Bill goes through Parliament.

[Robin Swann]

I do accept that point. If the hon. Gentleman looks back to my contribution in that debate at the end of January, he will see that I made that same point, because I could not understand why the Government were in such a rush to bring forward a piece of legislation that was not actually necessary, as he indicated.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

I am not an expert on the more recent developments, but I think I remember correctly that the previous Government were appealing that particular court decision, and this Government took a deliberate decision to discontinue the appeal.

[Robin Swann]

The right hon. Member is correct. That appeal was being heard at the time, and I remember those issues being raised.

I am conscious that this debate is on the Select Committee report, and I want to congratulate the work that has been done, and its sensitivity in balancing victims and veterans. Over the past number of weeks and months, concerns have been raised that the debate over here has focused on veterans and is doing a disservice to victims of the troubles. I think that is an inaccurate portrayal of the work done by members of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee and by those who take an active interest what the Bill is about.

I want to concentrate on one recommendation for the Bill that my party introduced, on the inclusion of sexual crimes in the types of crimes and incidents that can be looked at. It has been mentioned that the biggest objection to the previous Government’s legacy Act was that no Northern Ireland Executive party supported it. The Northern Ireland Assembly has debated the issue of sexual crimes, and there was cross-party support for a motion that said that the Assembly

“accepts that crimes of a sexual nature, including child sexual abuse, have a particularly insidious effect on society and have a long-lasting physical and psychological impact on the victim and their wider family”.

The motion called on the UK Government

“to ensure that victims of Troubles-related sexual violence can seek a legacy investigation as part of the proposed Legacy Commission and that crimes of a sexual nature, including rape and child sexual abuse, are included as a separate qualifying criteria alongside serious injury and death”.

I mention that because have tabled an amendment on the issue, and I am thankful to other Members for their support for it, but the Secretary of State’s response to date has been lacking. He said that the legacy commission can

“investigate Troubles-related sexual offences which are connected to a death or serious injury or that cause such injury”,

but that leaves out some cases.

Máiría Cahill, a young woman from a prominent republican family who was raped by a senior member of the IRA in west Belfast, has asked that such cases be included. Paudie McGahon, who was 17 at the time, was raped by an IRA man who had been moved to safehouse in the Irish Republic, but instead of facing justice for rape, the rapist was exiled. The Secretary of State has said in correspondence that these cases can now be investigated by the police. The reason why they were not brought to the police at the time was the threat of paramilitary reaction to the individuals and their families.

Yesterday, the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee heard from the Minister for Safeguarding and Violence against Women and Girls. I encourage anyone who does not serve on that Committee to listen to her evidence, because it relates to the type of abuse that happened during the troubles. That coercion, power and control is seen in abuse elsewhere, so I wanted to highlight that recommendation put forward by my party in its response to the inquiry.

A number of Members have raised the issue of trust and confidence in the Government and the new process. What worries me, as the Government move on with their changes and what they see as adaptations to the previous institutions, is a loss of trust and confidence. A lot of work has been done by key members of the ICRIR to engage with all sections of the community to make sure that those who in the past never came forward to seek justice are now engaging.

What concerns me about the new commission is that we begin to lose some of the credibility and trust that has been built up by the likes of Sir Declan Morgan and Peter Sheridan, who have put a lot of time, energy, sweat and personal commitment into driving forward the work of the ICRIR. It is the small things, such as the creation of two directors of investigation rather than one, which could take away from the work that has already been done.

The Select Committee Chair raised the influence of the Irish Government, and the Secretary of State has heard me say many times that I think the Irish Government are missing in this process. They have not stepped up. They have used words of favour and encouragement about what they will do and what they will bring tomorrow, but they have not produced anything in relation to what the UK Government are currently doing. If they had been honest actors, the two pieces of legislation would have run concurrently and been delivered at the same time.

The Secretary of Secretary of State referred to legislation around the Omagh investigation; that is completely separate legislation. The two should not be equated. The Omagh legislation is a specific response to the Omagh inquiry, not to anything that is currently being done. I do have concerns about what the Irish will do. There has been talk of them producing legislation in April or May. The Irish Government, I think, and the Teachtaí Dála we engaged with at Committee level, talked about the publication of a heads of a Bill, which is completely different from what we do.

I put on the record again my and my party’s concerns that the Irish Government will not be honest actors in this matter. We have experienced that in the past. We experienced it when they promised the release of documentation and records in respect of Kingsmill. What they actually produced was a folder of newspaper cuttings, which left the families deeply disappointed.

I congratulate the Committee on the publication of the report and I thank those who have come to take part in the debate. I look forward to continual engagement with all those involved, so that we can see the outworkings of the Government’s proposed legislation.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Dame Siobhain McDonagh (in the Chair)]

I apologise to the two Members who are standing; we have 12 minutes left for Back-Bench speeches, so that is six minutes each.

14:16

[Katrina Murray (Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dame Siobhain, and I am planning on being brief today. As a member of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, it gives me great pleasure to contribute to this debate and to the work that the Committee has done—the formal and informal evidence that we took and the people that we met. Even though I have friends who lost family members, it was exceptionally helpful to get that overall perspective.

It is clear that the troubles affected everybody who lived or served in Northern Ireland, particularly those who lived close to the border with the Irish Republic and those who lost loved ones in horrific circumstance, whether they were innocent civilians or members of the armed services. The bus tour that we took along the border with the South East Fermanagh Foundation will stay with me for the rest of my life. I know the Secretary of State and Minister have met with many of the same people that we did and the effects will be just as clear to them.

The report from the Select Committee about the action that needs to be taken is a recognition that this is probably the last opportunity we will get to try and do the right thing for those who lost loved ones, those who survived horrific attacks, and everybody who is still looking for answers.

I will concentrate on the recommendation to expand the definition of a close family member. In my mind, the current Bill and the response from the Government fail to recognise the issues about many of the service personnel who lost their lives in the troubles. Those who served on the frontline in our armed services were often young; they were in their late teens and early 20s. My constituent Donald Blair, who lost his life at Warrenpoint, was 23—others were 18 or 19. They had not settled down or started families, even at a time when people married much earlier than they do now. For somebody who was killed in 1971 at the age of 18, it is exceptionally unlikely that their parents will still be alive. In some parts of the country, it is increasingly unlikely that their siblings will still be alive, and they are also unlikely to have had children or grandchildren. Those victims are remembered by their cousins and more distant relations. Certainly, in cases that I know of, it is cousins who are the ones fighting for this information. They are fighting for enquiries for information that the legacy commission should be able to provide. We owe it to them not to bar them from getting answers; we owe it to them to expand definitions.

[Dame Siobhain McDonagh (in the Chair)]

I call Jim Shannon—a brief Jim Shannon.

14:20

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

Eight minutes of brevity, Dame Siobhain. I will try and squeeze it into eight minutes, but it will be difficult. I am very pleased to be here. I thank the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, and particularly the Chair, the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi), for her hard work on this topic, which is a complex issue with numerous concerns. I understand that it is impossible to please everyone, but we must always please the tenets of truth and justice. I do not believe that this has been achieved. I say that with great respect to the Committee and the Secretary of State.

The hon. Member for South Antrim (Robin Swann) has just reminded us of the murder of the two corporals. I remember where I was: it was Saturday, I was sitting watching the TV, and it felt like a film, but the brutality and violence of the despicable murder of those two soldiers was happening in real life.

My party has deep concerns that the Government have chosen to press ahead with their intent to restore provision for inquests without a fundamental appraisal of how the coronial system in Northern Ireland approaches troubles-related cases, specifically the actions of the security forces.

One need only to look at the disgraceful coroner’s report on the Clonoe inquest, where the coroner exceeded his remit by questioning the honest belief of ex-SAS soldiers during the 1992 ambush, where four IRA members were killed after attacking Coalisland Royal Ulster Constabulary station. That disgracefully politically motivated overreach of the coroner merely confirmed the view that those inquests are not designed to meet the obligations of truth and justice, but can ignore the actions of the terrorists and make victim-makers into victims.

The Government have taken no steps to rectify the system that allowed the Clonoe inquiry to report as it did, and therefore the right-thinking people of Northern Ireland—those who lived through the troubles: my generation and my parents’ generation—have no faith in the system, which they believe exists as a sop to terrorism, aiming to rewrite the evils we lived through as though they were understandable and excusable. Ask those burnt at La Mon, whose scars receive medical attention to this day, if they understand or excuse the bomb that murdered innocent people. If God spares me and I get home in time, I will be at the La Mon Hotel tonight, and it will be a reminder of what happened there.

The balance in the focus of investigations towards members of the security forces is in itself a barrier to fairness. Inquest proceedings have often enabled legal representatives to use high-profile public hearings to aggressively examine witnesses, including ageing veterans, and to push spurious and unchallenged narratives of the troubles.

The Democratic Unionist party does not agree that legal aid should be provided to the next of kin in an inquest —nor does it agree with the form of what Government have called “enhancing inquisitorial proceedings”, the bulk of which will focus on state involvement—but not to witnesses to those proceedings, or to those seeking answers and redress for their loved ones via legacy investigations. Many families bereaved through terrorism faced the ignominy of tick-box inquests, with little in the way of information provided and no state funded legal representation. That should not be compounded by sustaining a deep inequality in how inquests are dealt with going forward.

Subsequently, we cannot and will not support this approach, which gives power and funding to those who wish to paint blood on to the hands of RUC and service personnel who were held to account at the time and since, and yet allow republicans to be painted in glowing colours of glory. That is unbearable, and we will not ask our people to bear it. Neither can we allow to go unchallenged the repeated refusal of the Irish Government to admit their collusion, and continuing to be a haven of safety for republican terrorists, who knew they could skip across the border and not a question would be asked, not a car would be searched, and not a murderer of babies and women would be held to account.

I remember the murder of those two superintendents that the hon. Member for South Antrim referred to. Superintendents Breen and Buchanan were murdered by the IRA on the border. They had been at a meeting in the Republic of Ireland, when, coming back up north, the two of them were blown up at the border. This question has often been posed, and I pose it again today. The Garda Síochána had a mole who gave the information, the intelligence, to the IRA who then murdered those two guys at the border. The Republic of Ireland—forgive me for pointing the finger—has a case to answer in relation to those two men. They were murdered because they were RUC personnel, and yet the Garda Síochána never had an inquiry into the intelligence breakdown, or compassion for the families. I make that case.

I also make a case for Daniel McCormick and Kenneth Smyth—people might know that Kenneth Smyth was my cousin—murdered in December ’71. I also think of Lexie Cummings, murdered in Strabane. The people who murdered him escaped across the border. Where did the people who murdered Winston Donnell, the first UDR man ever to be killed, go? Across the border. Why did they go to the border? Because they could get away with it. I want accountability, so let us make the Garda Síochána and the Republic of Ireland accountable in this process. We hear about collusion in the RUC and the armed forces, with spurious allegations put forward, and yet the truth that the dogs on the street know about the Garda Síochána and the Irish Government is their shelter of murderers, and that is left as just the way things are. Well, that is not for me, and not for anyone else.

I remind the Westminster Hall Chamber that my family knows at first hand about that collusion, and we understand it. We know about the future of Unionists in the Republic of Ireland—it is a dark, cold and unforgiving place for Unionists. I hope they are listening down in the Republic of Ireland, because that is how my people see it. That is how my family felt, who left there to go north, because that was where they had a future. There was no future for my family, for my mum and dad, and those others from the Republic of Ireland who came north.

That is why any form of Irish co-operation with any inquiries can only begin with sincere apologies. Let us get those apologies. Let the Republic of Ireland apologise to us for giving sanctuary, security and a haven to those murdering scum that they were. That is what I want to hear about. Any form of Irish co-operation with any inquiries can only begin when that happens, and when we get some information leading to the prosecution of murders. Until that day comes, there can be, and should be, no co-operation with those whose hands are as bloody as some, such as Gerry “I was never in the IRA, by the way” Adams—we know him, as he is the one.

I said at the outset of my comments that we cannot satisfy everyone, but we must satisfy truth and justice. My mother was about truth and justice, always about what is right. This approach does neither, and merely further alienates the true victims of the troubles. That is why we ask any right-thinking Member of this House to refuse to allow legislation to pass that lets the murder of two unborn children in Omagh be painted as part of a glorious cause. It was not—it was evil and wicked. We stood for many years against that evil in Northern Ireland, so I stand against it today, together with others in this House. It cannot be permitted. I ask all Members present to join me and others in satisfying truth and justice, which is what it is always about. Eight minutes is almost done, so thank you, Dame Siobhain, for giving me the chance to speak for that wee bit longer.

14:28

[Mr Paul Kohler (Wimbledon) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dame Siobhain. I congratulate the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) on securing this debate. I begin by warmly acknowledging the men and women who served during Operation Banner.

Everyone knows—even the Tories, in their more candid moments—that the Conservatives’ legacy Act was a profound mistake, granting immunity to terrorists, creating a shameful moral equivalence between paramilitaries hellbent on breaking the law and our brave veterans who risked, and in many cases lost, their lives upholding the very rule of law that the legacy Act undermined. In the Dillon case, the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal was clear: core provisions of the Act were incompatible with the European convention on human rights. Yes, the new Government abandoned the appeal on that point in the Supreme Court, but with no faith in the position, they were right to do so.

That is why the remedial order mattered. It was a necessary step to bring the UK back within its legal obligations, and to restore a measure of trust for those who have waited decades for truth and accountability. The Conservatives, however, treated the order as a political opportunity, rather than as a moment for sober reflection. To use the plight of our veterans to rage against the ECHR and the Human Rights Act 1998 and to play destructive party politics is something that has not gone unnoticed among the many veterans organisations with whom I have been working—[Interruption.] I will give way.

[Alex Burghart]

I just want to say that the hon. Gentleman is wrong.

[Mr Kohler]

I will now move on to consider the Government’s response to the more salient recommendations made by the Select Committee. Turning first to the treatment of sexual offences, the Government acknowledge that the previous Act created a de facto bar on investigating sexual offences not linked to death or serious injury, but their proposed split model raises concerns. Clause 32 limits investigations to what is deemed necessary for ECHR compliance, which will result in the commission handling some cases while others fall to the police to investigate, creating potential confusion.

On the disclosure of reports, the commission is required to examine all circumstances while also considering specific family questions, but it is unclear how those duties will be balanced or the commission’s findings reported. When I visited the WAVE Trauma Centre, concerns were expressed that, by answering sometimes deeply personal questions, published reports could reveal issues and concerns that victims would not want made public. The chief commissioner, Sir Declan Morgan, has assured me that the commission will act with sensitivity in such circumstances, but victims’ families want something more tangible than that.

That leads directly to the role and powers of the commission. The proposal to grant powers through established statutory procedures rather than enshrining them in the Bill risks opacity and reduced accountability. While a “small number of cases” where current powers fall short are acknowledged, it is far from clear how or if those gaps will be addressed. Alongside the topic of powers sits the question of resources. While the Government’s commitment to a £250 million total funding envelope for legacy mechanisms is welcome, there is widespread agreement that that is not enough. The PSNI chief constable, Jon Boutcher, has given compelling testimony that he has insufficient funding to address his legacy responsibilities. The Government suggest that PSNI funding is a matter for the Northern Ireland Department of Justice and the Executive. However, the costs of legacy, arising as they did under what occurred during direct rule, must surely be borne by the British state, not out of funds provided by the Province’s normal funding formula.

The thorniest issue is, of course, the safeguards afforded to veterans. The Secretary of State has been at pains to stress the centrality of his six protections, but as he acknowledges, in their current form they

“do not go far enough”.

I know he has been in discussion with many veterans’ groups, and I have heard from many of them their gratitude for the time and consideration that he has given them. A date for the Bill Committee has still not been published, which I assume means that discussions within the Northern Ireland Office and the Ministry of Defence are still ongoing. While I have no desire to unduly rush the Secretary of State on this issue, I respectfully remind him that the many veterans’ groups to which he has been talking are anxious to know what extra safeguards will be included in the promised Government amendments to the Bill.

Closely connected to victims’ safeguards is the question of disclosure and national security. A major concern is the Government’s refusal to introduce a merits-based appeal against ministerial denials of disclosure, and the reliance instead on judicial review, which considers procedural correctness rather than the merits of a decision. While the Government cite the primacy of the Executive, that principle does not sit comfortably within a legacy process that is aimed at restoring public trust and transparency. I have consequently tabled an amendment to the Bill that would require any decision to block disclosure on national security grounds to be referred to the Intelligence and Security Committee. That would ensure proper scrutiny and accountability to Parliament.

Our goal is reconciliation. Whenever I ask about reconciliation, I am directed to part 4 of the legacy Act, which is not going to be repealed. Part 4 focuses on oral history and memorialisation. Those have an important role to play, but it is striking how little attention appears to be given to restorative justice in any meaningful sense, because reconciliation cannot be addressed through reports and archives alone. My primary concern is that justice is still being mediated through the narrow lens of lawyers, with criminal or civil actions given too great a prominence in the process. I have personally participated in the restorative justice process, and I know that it begins with the questions that many victims of the troubles are asking: “Why me?” or “Why my loved ones?”

Restorative justice creates a space for answers, acknowledgment, and some form of resolution. The current Bill offers no meaningful avenue for restorative justice, which is why I have tabled amendments to incorporate that formally into the process, ensuring that victims and veterans have a voluntary, structured mechanism with which to engage and seek meaningful reconciliation. Without that, reconciliation risks being misconceived and incomplete.

At its core, this process will command confidence only if victims feel heard, veterans are treated fairly, and the system delivers answers that are credible and transparent. Broad commitments alone are not enough. The Government must address the gaps highlighted by the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee. Without doing so, the process risks failing those who it is intended to serve, undermining trust and leaving decades of questions unanswered.

14:35

[Alex Burghart (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

I thank the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee for its work. The Committee is always incredibly thoughtful and diligent in the prosecution of its duties, and the report has been very interesting. I will try to resist the opportunity to re-litigate the whole troubles Bill and the argument around the legacy Act in the next 10 minutes, rather than focus on the report. However, it is important that hon. Members remember how the legacy Act came to be, and how the previous Labour Government treated the whole issue of the peace process.

The idea of immunity was good enough for the Labour Government in 1998—indeed, it was fundamental to the legislation that fell within the peace process. I think of the two-year limit on sentences that my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) referred to, but also of the legislation regarding bodies that had been buried, and about the destruction of weapons where forensic evidence was destroyed. Those were all forms of immunity, and it is why—this is the point raised by the hon. Member for South Antrim (Robin Swann)—an appeal to the Supreme Court could easily have been successful. Very experienced legal advice shows that that would have been the case, so it was wrong of the Government to drop it.

The Government have decided that they are opposed to immunity, but they were not opposed to immunity in 1998. They were not opposed to immunity in 2005, when Peter Hain brought forward a Bill that would have given immunity only to former terrorists. Only under enormous pressure from the House, which decided that it would have to introduce immunity for soldiers as well, was that measure dropped under pressure from Sinn Féin. The Labour party has a very selective memory on those issues.

[Fleur Anderson]

In 1998 immunity was in the Good Friday agreement, and the whole population got to vote on that, and on whether or not they agreed with that immunity—it was very controversial. There was no vote on whether the population agreed with immunity in the legacy Act. In fact, all the democratically elected parties lined up to oppose that immunity.

[Alex Burghart]

It applied to only one side, and over time that one-sidedness became apparent to lots of people, including veterans. That is why it was important. In 2005, there was no democratic mandate for what the Labour Government tried to do to give immunity to terrorists. What we are trying to do, and what we tried to do in our legacy Act, is rebalance the argument, and in so doing bring about the sort of process that my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East spoke so powerfully about. The adversarial system will not bring about proper truth and reconciliation, and it will not encourage people to come forward with new information. Instead, it will reopen old wounds and allow for the continuation of the troubles by other means. For that very important reason of principle, we cannot support the legislation.

To return to the report issued by the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, I will quickly pick up on four areas. On the consideration of the ICRIR, I pay tribute to Sir Declan Morgan, who has been an excellent head. Every time that I have heard people question the ICRIR’s independence, I have felt the need to come to Sir Declan’s defence. Anyone who has met him and seen his work will know that he is thoroughly independent, and woe betide any politician who tried to lean on him.

The argument that the ICRIR has struggled to build the trust and authority needed to operate effectively is already outdated. As of 30 November 2025, 231 requesting individuals had approached the commission, 245 cases were recorded, and 110 investigations had been opened into a total of 188 deaths and five cases of serious harm. Those numbers were growing every month. Indeed, the more time that the ICRIR was given, the more public trust it gained and the more its work was flourishing. Now, just as it is getting going, it is going to be cut off at the knees. I was pleased that the report mentioned the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal finding in 2024, which said,

“we find that these arrangements do not of themselves offend the principle of independence given the fact that ICRIR is ultimately made up and staffed by independent investigators and decision makers including the commissioners.”

I would much rather that the ICRIR was being given time.

It is clear that there are no explicit or particular protections for veterans in the Government’s legislation, and I was pleased that the Committee said that the Government were overselling that claim—indeed they are. No armed forces bodies believe that these protections are sufficient. Contrary to what the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Mr Kohler) said, many veterans’ groups are concerned that the Government are moving away from the policies established by the Conservative party in power.

On the subject of Ireland, there were very powerful contributions from the hon. Members for South Antrim and for Strangford (Jim Shannon). We all want this element of the Government’s arrangements to work, but we must remain sceptical, not least because of the Republic’s long-standing failure to produce the goods in this area. As the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee outlined on page 85 of its report, equivalent legislation structures are not expected. The hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) used a wonderful phrase, stating that there is a lack of “practical outworkings” in this area, and indeed there is. With all due respect to the Secretary of State, it was a dreadful missed opportunity that the framework did not include a commitment from the Republic to start its own Omagh inquiry. That was the most wicked attack of the whole troubles, and it is shameful that there are only investigations into what the British state could have done to prevent it, rather than investigations into the people who committed that dreadful atrocity.

I was pleased that the Committee referred to costs, as did several other hon. Members. The PSNI estimates that it will need an extra £1 billion over the next 10 years to cope with the new caseload. The legacy commission is seriously underfunded for the additional caseload that it will acquire as it transitions from being the ICRIR. Without that money, there will be a huge backlog in the caseload of the legacy commission, and there will also be a reduction in frontline policing in Northern Ireland. That is unacceptable. We strongly disagree with what the Government are doing, but if they are going to do it, they must make the money available to ensure that public services and institutions in Northern Ireland function properly. Finally, I ask the Secretary of State one quick question: when will we see the Bill again?

14:43

[The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (Hilary Benn)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dame Siobhain. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi), who chairs the Select Committee with such distinction, on securing the debate. I thank the members of the Select Committee who have come today, including those who I know have made a very special effort to be present. The Government have published their response to the report. I will not rehearse all those arguments and details today, but I will do my best, in the limited time I have, to respond to many of the points that have been made.

As we have heard, not least from the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), the legacy of the troubles still affects the lives of many people in Northern Ireland. We need to get this right. We know how we got here: the previous piece of legislation, whatever its intentions, did not work, and that is why we have the troubles Bill before us. I am confident that the provisions contained in the Bill will bring about the necessary reform to the commission. I think it is fair to say that it had a reasonably positive response from victims and survivors and others in Northern Ireland, although there is still a deep lack of trust in what has happened.

We undoubtedly owe our Operation Banner veterans an enormous debt. I will be clear: there will be no rewriting of history. The Bill is not going to change the way in which people view the troubles. As we have hard, terrorists were responsible for the vast majority of deaths. There was always an alternative, and there never was—never will be—any equivalent between our brave armed forces and those who set out to kill their fellow citizens.

The Bill includes strong safeguards for veterans that were not in the legacy Act. They have been introduced to try to ensure that veterans have fair treatment, but I am, with the Secretary of State for Defence and the Armed Forces Minister, looking at what more we can do to build greater confidence. The House will see the result of those considerations in Committee, and the date will be set in the normal way. I have to be frank in this debate, however, that we are not going to accept any proposals that seek to reintroduce the immunity provisions. The Government disagree with immunity as a matter of principle and there is no support in Northern Ireland. Equally, there is no question of anyone who followed the rules being prosecuted.

To respond to the points raised, on funding, as I said to the Select Committee, there will need to be further discussions as the caseload of the commission unfolds. The victims and survivors advisory group has a very specific role. I made it clear that I am looking to ensure veteran representation on it. I agree with what Joe McVey said about the nature of some of our debate, but I think we have had a more balanced debate this afternoon.

On close family members, which was raised by the Chair of the Select Committee and my hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch (Katrina Murray), we have to strike a balance. Clearly, if there are no close family members, other family members—for example, grandchildren—can bring cases, but the House needs to think about what happens if one family member says, “I want it investigated,” and another says, “I do not.”

On the appointment of judges, the point was made that Ministers appoint judges to public inquiries and I do not hear people saying, “That means the judges are not independent,” but of course the holder of this office will take advice from judicial experts. On disclosure, which was raised by the Chair of the Select Committee and the hon. Member for Wimbledon (Mr Kohler), we are making two changes: there will be a duty to conduct a balancing exercise and to give reasons where possible, and it will be open to anyone to judicially review.

On the point about the Irish commitments that many Members have raised, the Irish Government have said that once our legislation is in place, they will give the fullest possible co-operation to the legacy commission. They had already established by the end of December the Garda Síochána unit and it will pursue potential investigative opportunities. I was in Dublin to discuss that earlier this month. The Irish Government have now published the legislation to enable witness evidence to be given to the Omagh inquiry. I take the point about the separation, but I think that shows good faith because I have no doubt in my mind that the legislation to give effect to that fullest possible co-operation will appear soon.

I have great respect for the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis). I do not think I have ever insulted anyone in any debate about legacy, and I respect the point that he advances. However, with respect, there are no vexatious prosecutions—please can we not use that phrase? If we go down that road, it says something about independent prosecutors that I think is not justified by the evidence. I would draw to his attention and that of the House the protected disclosure arrangements under the Independent Commission on Information Retrieval that the troubles Bill will introduce, which were negotiated by the last Government under the Stormont House agreement.

My hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson) made a powerful point about investigations that were shut down. I say to the hon. Member for South Antrim (Robin Swann) that the protections were designed for veterans—that is why they are in the legislation—but they apply to all, mostly for the reasons that the right hon. Member for New Forest East set out: we have to treat people fairly under the law.

On sexual crimes, the Bill will deal with the gap that the legacy Act created, because there will be no alleged sexual offences that occurred during the period of the troubles that cannot be investigated, and that is extremely important. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch, who serves on the Select Committee, that this is probably our last best chance to get this right. No Member of the House shows more clearly the effect that the troubles have had on individuals and families than the hon. Member for Strangford. I agree with the hon. Member for Wimbledon that victims need to feel heard.

I say to the hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart), for whom I also have enormous respect, that it is not a case of reopening old wounds. The wounds have never healed, which is why so many people are still searching for answers. I agree that attitudes towards the ICRIR are beginning to change; the growing caseload is a sign of that. I would, however, suggest that the fact that there will be further changes to the way it works—I took the decision not to abolish it, because I have confidence in Sir Declan, as the hon. Gentleman does—gives people greater confidence in coming forward, because that is what this is all about.

Given the wide range of views held by so many people, it will not be possible—let us be honest—to give everybody everything they are looking for. As I have said before, if dealing with legacy were easy, we would not be sitting here this afternoon debating it; it would have been done a long time ago. It is the unfinished business of the Good Friday agreement, and we have to find a balance.

I pledge to the House that I will continue listening to everyone who has views to express, including the Select Committee, because every single one of us is only too conscious of the passage of time. For families, time is running out and they still do not have the answers. That is why the Government are determined to sort this out and build the trust that has been so absent for victims, survivors, those who serve and wider society in Northern Ireland. We really must make every effort we can to get this right, above all for the families who have waited far too long for answers.

14:51

[Tonia Antoniazzi]

I thank the Secretary of State for his response to our report. As Chair of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, I know it is very important that we work collaboratively. I am a Welsh Member of Parliament, and many members of the Committee do not have Northern Ireland seats, but we have all been touched by the troubles. My constituent Private Robert Davies was shot in Lichfield station in 1990. He would have been my age if he were still alive today. The troubles touch the lives of everybody across the country and across the world, but particularly those in Northern Ireland.

I pay tribute to the former Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson), who made an excellent speech. I thank our friends in Northern Ireland and everybody who has worked with us.

I would like to take the opportunity to thank the Clerk of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, Mr Stephen Habberley, who will be moving on after five years of work with us. His team, his leadership and the help that I and other Committee members have been given should be noted in Hansard.

I thank everybody for their contributions. This debate has been handled with such sensitivity by everybody in the Chamber. I hope that we can continue with our piece of work on reconciliation in the same manner, and that we can have the same constructive dialogue with the Government.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the Second Report of the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, The Government’s new approach to addressing the legacy of the past in Northern Ireland, HC 586, and the Government response, HC 1716.

14:53

Sitting suspended.

Backbench Business

Thursday 19th March 2026 Westminster Hall

Banking Services: Accessibility

Thursday 19th March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Matt Western in the Chair]

15:00

[Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the accessibility of banking services.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Western. I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for permitting me the opportunity to raise the issues and concerns about access to banking services across the country and in our communities. These are nationwide concerns, and the issue vexes many MPs and constituents—certainly in my constituency, where a large number of banks have closed in the last decade. Many people, particularly the digitally excluded and the most vulnerable, have been left in extremely difficult circumstances.

My relationship with banking is rather rudimentary, and I hope that those more engaged in debates on banking and financial services will tolerate my rudimentary dialogue on this issue; it is not one of my specialist subjects by any means, as I think will become apparent. Nevertheless, as a Member of Parliament, I have taken a very close interest in this issue, largely provoked by the closure in January this year of a bank in my constituency —in Penzance, west Cornwall. That has had a rather offensive impact on the town.

I am also concerned about the rather high-handed manner in which this closure was carried out, without any consultation—simply an announcement that was then followed through. I was shocked by the impact and many resulting factors of the closure, as well as the dismissive attitude of the bank when it came to that impact on some of the most vulnerable, disabled and digitally excluded people in the community. I have had a nine-year sabbatical from this place; when I was here previously, I did not face these issues as there were not any bank closures. There have been significant closures since. I was surprised at the dialogue and the attitude of the high-street bank—in this case, Lloyds.

I declare an interest in that I was a loyal Lloyds customer until last week; I had been for more than the last half century. I have been so dismayed by the attitude and approach of the bank to this closure that I have withdrawn all my custom and taken it elsewhere, and the bank knows it. The same applies to many in the Penzance area of my constituency.

When it announced the closure, the bank promised the local community a community banker who would come for one day every fortnight into a public building to offer an alternative service to help those people who needed face-to-face banking. I have had the following information from a constituent who attended one of those sessions very recently; they have only just been set up. The hub, held in St John’s Hall, a local authority building in Penzance, consisted of one community banker, with equipment in a very large room; no cash or notes were available, only advice. There were 28 people queueing to see the community banker, waiting in a very public place in an echoey room; there is no confidentiality there. The first two people waiting were in the meeting room for one hour—20 people stayed; eight left because they could not wait any longer.

This person’s wife arrived at 9 am and arrived back home just before 12 midday, having walked to and fro. It was a total shambles, which shows the disregard Lloyds has for people. The next time the community banker arrives, which is apparently now in three weeks’ time, the hub will be held upstairs, which is not good for older and disabled people. The nearby post office at St Clare could not dispense any cash during that time because the system was down, including the cashpoint outside the post office. Lloyds has recently stopped people from cashing cheques at post offices as well, so banking services that should be and have been provided to people have been withdrawn.

According to Fair4All Finance, more than 20 million people across the UK are in “financially vulnerable circumstances”. One in 10 people has no savings, and 21% have less than £1,000 in savings—nearly a third of our population are in extremely financially vulnerable situations: just one or two pay packets away from homelessness. Nearly 2 million people have used an unlicensed lender or loan shark in the last year, and 4.5 million people in financial vulnerability prefer face-to-face banking with a person. The issue has grown in urgency in many parts of the country. Access to in-person banking should be an essential public service. Closures affect people’s financial security, local economies, small business survival, digital inclusion, and the independence and dignity of older and disabled people.

The Minister will no doubt refer to the fact that banking hubs have replaced the banks, which have all been removed from towns, falling like a house of cards. However, having looked at the services available through hubs, I have to say that they are very limited in scope. I wonder about their sustainability in the longer run.

[Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for securing this debate, because so many people in my area of Devon, as well as his area of Cornwall, feel strongly about the issue. Not only are fewer services available when a bank closes its high street branch, but, if they are available a banking hub, they are available only one day per week rather than five. Does my hon. Friend agree that it is in the gift of the Government to reconsider the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023, and to look again at the ease with which banks are closing their high street branches?

[Andrew George]

I strongly agree with my hon. and gallant Friend. I will come to questions to the Minister in a moment; I believe that the Government need to look at the robustness and sustainability of those services. What has been put in the place of banks is rather flimsy in the longer term, and that represents a risk to the future of financial services, which are essential, particularly for the most vulnerable and digitally excluded in our society.

It is worth reflecting that Members of Parliament using digital technologies perhaps do not entirely comprehend how difficult that is for some people. I am not one of the most IT-savvy people on the planet by any means, so I sympathise with those people to a certain extent. Even when someone gets on top of the electronic capacity required to use electronic services, the services often still contain degrees of linguistic ambiguity that leave even the most intelligent and educated among us rather confused. Unless someone can speak to a human being, that ambiguity remains and the inaccessibility of those services continues as well. It is not just the electronics, but the fact that someone cannot ask anyone who has designed the system what on earth they mean by the options available.

I am surprised that the review of access to financial services has been reduced to an assessment of merely cash. That is what the regulations seem to say. My hon. and gallant Friend suggested that the Government need to look at this again, and I hope they will. The framework designed to protect communities from losing central banking services is far too narrowly focused. Current legislation and regulatory oversight look almost exclusively at access to cash, but needs to look at access to banking, banking advice, account advice and other services. Even Link’s formal assessments openly state that it does not consider access to more complex banking needs. It allows banks to close branches even when communities remain deeply dependent on face-to-face support, as we found in the case of Penzance, which I mentioned earlier.

I ask the Minister to extend the regulatory framework, including the 2023 Act, which my hon. and gallant Friend has referred to already, so that it protects access to banking and not just cash; so that it strengthens and widens the FCA’s role to ensure that local impact, equality analysis and access to banking services more widely are mandatory considerations before closures are permitted to go ahead; so that it requires realistic travel assessments for rural and island communities; so that it improves standards and the roll-out of service standards for banking hubs; and so that it considers proportionate service obligations on banks, not least because these banks are, after all, too big to fail. In 2008, Lloyds was bailed out to the tune of more than £20 billion of taxpayers’ money.

The bank says in its branding that it is “By Your Side”—but apparently only until it finds that to be unsuitable: an empty branding slogan, one is bound to observe. I hope the Minister looks at this issue. It is a matter not of consumer choice, but consumer displacement. Around 14% of adults in financially vulnerable communities in the UK—that is 2.8 million people—live in rural areas, and the rural nature and travel involved need to be considered, too.

[Chris Bloore (Redditch) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Western. I congratulate the hon. Member on securing this debate. He makes a really pertinent point about the issue of transport. One of the most frustrating elements for me, apart from the initial announcement of a closure of a bank on my high street or in the villages that I represent, often occurs when they tell people the location of their nearest alternative branch. I do not know whether the people running the banks understand the local transport system, but it can often take three and a half hours on public transport to even get to those branches. Does the hon. Member agree that it would be helpful if, when banks made these decisions, they consulted the public transport available to those losing their branch?

[Andrew George]

The hon. Member makes a pertinent and relevant point. That is why these matters need to be taken into account; it cannot be purely about access to cash, which is all that Link currently needs to consider. As long as there is an ATM in some corner within a mile or two of someone’s community, that is deemed to be sufficient to justify any bank closing anywhere. However, it is not sufficient.

Now that the Penzance branch has closed, of the 39 Lloyds branches in Cornwall and on the Isles of Scilly, only two are left in Cornwall. People on the Isles of Scilly have to travel by ferry, paying £220 for a return ticket to the mainland—as well as for an overnight stay and a two-hour bus ride to Truro and back—to get access to face-to-face banking. That is the reality my constituents face to get access to the services.

Why are face-to-face transactions important? They are important for identity verification, resolution of fraud or scams, handling significant disputes or matters of banking interpretation, complex account queries, CHAPS and international payments, business cash deposits, and change-giving services. They are also important when there are bereavement or probate matters, as well as for community organisations, when counter-signatories are required, and for sports clubs and voluntary organisations. Those things are absolutely essential to the life of such organisations.

I am conscious of time; although I could say a great deal more on this important issue, I want to make sure that other hon. Members have an opportunity. Since 2015, around 6,700 branches—68% of the whole banking network—have closed. That is significant, and the impact on our communities has been fundamental and wide-ranging. On the day in January this year that Lloyds decided to close its Penzance branch, the bank had been in the most iconic building in the centre of our town, Market House, for literally 100 years. It was still serving 33,000 customers. Twenty-nine per cent of those local customers used the branch exclusively, and more than 1,000 regular weekly users—around one in 20 of the town’s residents—relied on it. The local population is older than the average and, as I mentioned, there was no consultation on the closure. Banks are able simply to ignore those facts.

Another pattern is that the banks will refer to the significant increase in people using apps, online banking, telephone banking and other alternatives to the face-to-face banking available on the high street. Often, that increase is a result of enforcement by the banks themselves; they fail to take into account that it results from their policy of making it difficult for people to use face-to-face services. Indeed, when customers go through the front door of branches that the banks are trying to close down, they are often met by someone who triages them out of the door again, to go and use an app or online service that they do not want to use. The banks are creating the circumstances in which they can justify closing branches.

I hope that the Minister will consider strengthening the regulations, recognising the limitations that exist, and challenging the banks on the services they are providing, as well as the dismissive way in which they ignore the most vulnerable in society—the people who will be suffering the most. In towns such as Penzance, the impact on the viability of the town is significant. When high street banks have closed in other towns, footfall—the lifeblood of commerce in the centre of a market town—has been significantly depleted as a result. That is certainly one of the great fears in Penzance if the other bank branches fall like a house of cards after the closure of Lloyds. We are trying to stop that by demanding that the other banks demonstrate their loyalty to the town. One by one, we are getting them to commit their loyalty, but only for a limited period, up to 2030; we need to go way beyond that.

I hope that my comments have helped to set the debate up for others to contribute, and I hope that the Minister is listening.

15:19

[David Williams (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Western. I am grateful to the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) for securing this timely debate.

The debate is particularly timely for me, because only last week the last bank in the whole of my constituency—Lloyds in Tunstall—closed its doors for the last time, leaving Stoke-on-Trent North and Kidsgrove without a single bank. In Kidsgrove, the last bank, Barclays, closed back in 2023, and Burslem residents have been without a bank for years. I remember going to the bank in Burslem with my mum when I was a kid. I queued up and watched people pay in and take out money. It was a place with a social purpose and someone to speak to. It was part of my everyday life and the everyday life of my family, and I know that is true for all members of our community. That has been lost.

Since my election, I have fought, alongside residents and local councillors, against the final bank’s closure. When Lloyds announced that it would leave Tunstall, I wrote to the bank and met its representatives to make the case against the closure, but really the decision had already been made. It was a case of “computer says no”—that is what it felt like. That is the problem: these decisions are made far away, on the basis of narrow commercial logic with little regard for communities like ours.

I have been campaigning on this issue in my constituency, but I did not stop there. I campaigned to bring banking hubs back into my constituency, and pushed for provision in both Tunstall and Kidsgrove. In Tunstall, we have a banking hub that is open, and I want to place on record my thanks to Aaron and the team at the post office who are doing great work with residents who have lost access to what I call “proper banking”, but we need to be clear that a banking hub is not a replacement; it is a mitigation. Meanwhile, in Kidsgrove, there is no banking hub at all—or no proper banking hub, I ought to say. There is something that is branded as a banking hub, but I do not class it as a real banking hub. Let me say it plainly: Kidsgrove needs a full-time banking hub, and it needs it now. We are told that alternatives are available. We are told to go and use post offices, but the post office in Kidsgrove has been closed for a year. We are told to go elsewhere, but “elsewhere” simply is not accessible for many people, particularly older and vulnerable residents, people without transport, and people who run small businesses.

I am really pleased that we pushed forward on banking hubs in our manifesto. They are part of the solution, but they are not good enough yet. They are limited and can be inconsistent. My question to the Minister is simple: what more will the Government do to expand banking hubs and make sure that they provide the full services that people need? This is about more than purely banking. Banks were anchor institutions on our high streets. They brought footfall into our town centres, supported businesses and gave confidence to our towns.

When the last bank leaves a town like Tunstall, Kidsgrove or Burslem, it sends a message that the place does not matter any more. We need to decide what level of access communities should be able to rely on, because right now the answer seems to be whatever is left behind, and that simply is not good enough. I urge the Minister to act. We need to strengthen the rules on bank closures; we need to expand proper banking hubs, including in places like Kidsgrove; and we need to recognise banking for what it is: a basic, fundamental service. If the market will not provide it, the Government must act. My constituents cannot be left behind, and they tell me that today, they are.

15:23

[Cameron Thomas (Tewkesbury) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship for the first time, Mr Western. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Andrew George) for introducing this debate on a subject that is so important to his constituents and those of so many other Members.

Lloyds Banking Group recently informed me, with only four months’ notice, that it is set to close its Tewkesbury branch alongside 94 others across the UK. Members who represent rural constituencies similar to mine will understand just how hard that will be for residents, not only of Tewkesbury but of the smaller settlements around it. The closure of Lloyds is only the latest in a sorry pattern that we have faced in recent years. In Tewkesbury town alone, the Barclays branch was shuttered in 2025, following the closure of Halifax only a few years previously. In Bishop’s Cleeve, NatWest and TSB have perished, as has the Lloyds mobile banking service. Winchcombe has not had a bank branch since 2018, and had lost face-to-face banking altogether for a brief but painful period until the post office was reopened in 2025. I take this opportunity to thank Councillor Gemma Madle for her excellent work in securing the reopening of that branch, and indeed to thank the Post Office for providing that lifeline.

As I said, such bank closures are prohibitive for residents in rural communities, particularly the elderly, the digitally excluded and those who fear the transition to digital banking due to the threat of criminal exploitation, but they are damaging in other ways too. For our high street businesses, a bank closure means the added administrative burden of closing their account or moving it to a bank with a continuing presence, if one remains. It means that the footfall that would otherwise occur on Tewkesbury high street, from people who live in outlying villages and bank with Lloyds, might now benefit the high street in Cheltenham or Evesham. It means another empty front on a historic high street and another signal from the bank that it will no longer justify serving its customers face to face.

I cannot make this case without also stating that these closures are occurring while Tewkesbury borough continues to develop as the fastest-growing borough outside London. How can it be sustainable that, as the local population grows so quickly, the services on our high street continue to diminish? On 13 February, I wrote to Lloyds Banking Group with my concerns. I have yet to receive a response. I echo the criticism that my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives made of Lloyds Banking Group’s communication. Like his constituents, mine were not consulted; neither were my local businesses, and I certainly was not. It is a continuing pattern, which I experienced as a Lloyds customer until I ended my association with the bank, several years ago.

The Government have pledged to open 350 new banking hubs across the country by the end of this Parliament. I am glad for those communities that now feature one. Sadly, there is not a single banking hub within the Gloucestershire local authority, and I understand that Tewkesbury will not qualify for one until its final bank branch closes. With only TSB remaining on Tewkesbury high street, will the Government support my residents with a banking hub now, or must they wait until they have no access at all? This paints a picture to me that we need more than the 350 hubs pledged.

[Robbie Moore (Keighley and Ilkley) (Con)]

The hon. Member is making an excellent speech. After a long campaign in my constituency, we have been lucky enough to secure a banking hub in Ilkley. It opens in a couple of weeks. I fear that more bank branches will close in Keighley and we will need to secure a banking hub there. One challenge has been that when Cash Access UK and Link assess whether a banking hub should be opened, they look at when the last bank closes but also assess access to cash through a cash machine. I suggest that when the hon. Member is trying to secure banking hubs in his constituency, he should pay attention to making sure that there is a cash machine on the outside of the hub, because I have had that challenge in my constituency.

[Cameron Thomas]

I thank the hon. Member for the advice; I will certainly take that forward. I am glad to hear that his constituents are served by a banking hub.

I close by welcoming the formal review of access to cash that the Financial Conduct Authority is undertaking, although, as my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives pointed out, it does not incorporate access to other banking services. I worry about communities such as mine, which will suffer in the interim.

15:28

[Katrina Murray (Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) on securing this timely and appropriate debate. I will tell you a tale of three towns with relatively big populations on the outskirts of Glasgow, of a number of banks, of the actions of one banking group in particular, and of a community fight back.

When a bank moves out, what replaces it? For far too many communities the answer has been nothing. In Kilsyth in my constituency, that was exactly the situation. The last bank branch, the TSB, closed in 2021 prior to any automatic assessment for a community banking hub. When that branch went, something more than a service was lost. It meant longer journeys, less footfall, and real anxiety for people who simply want to manage their banking face to face.

I know from experience, having lost my father last year, that my mum—in her 80s, dealing with the bereavement and having to close his accounts—wanted to deal with the bank face to face. She did not feel comfortable using an app and did not want to talk to a call centre—they did not understand Scots law. I have spoken to local businesses that handle cash every day, which were left asking where they were supposed to go, and to older residents—not my mum—who do not bank online and should not be expected to, and I heard time and again that people should not have felt forgotten.

But Kilsyth did not accept it. The community spoke up. A request was made by my team, working with the local Labour councillors, Councillor Jean Jones and Councillor Heather Brannan-McVey, whose mum, Nan, was one of the previous bank staff—Heather is still known as “Nan from the bank’s daughter”—and indeed the whole local community. Link carried out the assessment, and we are expecting the interim banking hub for Kilsyth to be opened in the next few weeks.

This is what good looks like, in an area that lost its bank five years ago—a shared banking space; cash in and cash out; bill payments at the counter; customers being able to speak to somebody who will talk them through all the things they need to do. Every bank does different things through the hub. One improvement that could be made would be to offer a full range of banking services—but on different days, staff are there from different banks to deal with things that cannot be done on the app. It is not a perfect replica of the past, but it is a practical solution for the future. Crucially, it puts banking back where it belongs: in the community. In Kilsyth, it enables people to manage their money locally again and lets businesses bank their takings without leaving town, without pushing aside those who rely on cash. But communities like Kilsyth should not have to fight that hard just to get the basics back.

I want to talk about another banking group and the closure of Santander in Cumbernauld. We were notified in 2024 of a plan to close the Cumbernauld branch of Santander, with a suitable alternative available in Kirkintilloch, eight miles away or 25 minutes on one bus. The Cumbernauld branch closed on 3 July 2025. In late January, a few months ago, notification was given that the Santander branch in Kirkintilloch would close on 29 April, with alternative provision available in central Glasgow, 10 miles away from Cumbernauld and over an hour by most buses. I contend that if the plans had been more transparent, the original Cumbernauld closure should not have been supported, because there was not a reasonable alternative in place.

This is about making things transparent, being honest with communities, making sure people are not pushed aside and making sure we have systems for everybody. Banking hubs show what is possible when communities are listened to and industry steps up, but they are not a one-off success story. I ask the Minister: how do we go further and faster? How do we ensure transparency? How do we make sure more communities like Kilsyth, Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch get the access they need? How do we make sure we get face-to-face banking and not just cash? It is not a luxury.

15:34

[David Chadwick (Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Western. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Andrew George) for securing this vital debate. He represents a similar constituency to my own, with the additional challenge of some extra islands, and I was struck by some of the similarities in our experiences—particularly the dismissive attitude of Lloyds, which was mentioned by several Members.

My hon. Friend spoke about the reliance on community bankers, which banks have provided as an alternative, but, similarly to him, I have found in my constituency that the locations in which they are offering those services are not up to scratch, and local residents do not feel comfortable with them. My hon. Friend also said that the FCA criteria need to be widened, a call that I certainly agree with.

My hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Cameron Thomas) spoke of the impact of closures on small towns and local economies. There is only one bank left in Tewkesbury; I am sure that is causing a huge inconvenience for his residents. Likewise, I agree with his call for the number of hubs to be increased. The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (David Williams) spoke of Lloyds’ “computer says no” approach, and the hon. Member for Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch (Katrina Murray) spoke about the community campaigns in her constituency and the impact of Santander’s closures.

Across my constituency of Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe, we are seeing a steady and deeply worrying erosion of access to basic banking services. The issue here is whether people can withdraw their own money, whether small businesses can function, and whether elderly residents can manage their day-to-day lives. In rural Wales, access to cash and in-person banking is not a luxury; it is a necessity.

Take Hay-on-Wye, an internationally renowned tourist destination and home to the Hay festival, with a thriving high street built on independent businesses. It is heavily cash dependent, particularly during the tourist season, yet it has no bank, and its only 24-hour ATM is routinely out of action, often for weeks at a time. What message does that send—a town that welcomes the world yet cannot guarantee access to cash for its own residents or its many visitors? That is not just inconvenient; it is economically damaging.

In Presteigne, the situation is even more stark: the town has lost its bank branch entirely. The nearest alternative—this speaks to the point about long bus journeys—is now two hours and 40 minutes away by bus. This is a town with a large elderly population—people who are far less likely to bank online and far more reliant on face-to-face services. Those people are effectively being told that accessing their own money now requires a full day’s travel. That simply cannot be right.

In Brecon and Llandrindod Wells—the largest towns in Brecknockshire and Radnorshire respectively—each town is now down to its last remaining bank. Those towns are key hubs for their counties, serving not just local residents but the wider Brecon Beacons and Radnorshire area, with a significant tourism and agricultural economy. Yet, under the current rules, those towns must wait until the final bank closes before they can be considered for a banking hub. That forces us into a perverse situation in which communities have to lose everything before they qualify for any support. Why are we waiting for failure when we can clearly see it coming?

In Pontardawe, residents have already been left without a bank. They are now forced to travel to Neath—a round trip by bus that can often take more than two hours. Again, that disproportionately affects older residents, those without cars and those on lower incomes. Financial access is becoming a postcode lottery.

The fundamental problem is that the criteria for banking hubs are deeply flawed. They simply do not reflect how rural communities actually work. The current model looks at whether there are 7,000 people within 1 km of a high street, but rural Wales does not work like that, and nor do many areas across the United Kingdom. Towns like Brecon, Hay, Llandrindod and Presteigne act as hubs for vast surrounding areas—villages and rural communities many miles beyond that arbitrary radius. The system therefore systematically underestimates need, and communities lose out as a result.

Banking hubs are about more than convenience; they are also about inclusion. We still have significantly high levels of digital exclusion, particularly among older residents and in rural areas, where many struggle to get a mobile signal at home. Many people simply cannot manage their finances entirely online, and they should not be forced to. Banks should have a duty of care to their customers. After all, their profits are built on the money that customers entrust to them.

We also need to ensure reliable access to cashpoints. An ATM that is frequently out of service is no access at all. Let us be clear: this situation is not inevitable. The major banks are making significant profits. They are benefiting from higher interest rates and, in many cases, generous tax arrangements. Yet at the same time, they are withdrawing services from the very communities that helped them to build those profits.

In Powys, for example, a county that covers nearly a third of the land mass of Wales, there are no remaining Lloyds branches at all. That is an extraordinary withdrawal of service. Yet Lloyds made a £6.7 billion profit last year, which was up 12%. Its CEO, Charlie Nunn, received a total pay package of £7.4 million for 2025, and he is reportedly set up for a potential maximum payout of £17.7 million under a new performance-related pay policy proposed for 2026. There we have it: he will get a £10 million pay rise for closing bank branches across the country. Communities are being abandoned unnecessarily while banking profits are being prioritised.

[Cameron Thomas]

I hope my hon. Friend does not mind if I join in on his last point, which adds to the comments made by our hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Andrew George) about the branding that Lloyds uses to portray itself as “By Your Side”, as though it is a member of the community. It uses the powerful image of the black stallion and powerful music, the name of which evades me. The reality is that it is a multi-billion-pound juggernaut and that black stallion has well and truly bolted from 94 of our communities, ridden by a CEO taking home £17 million.

[David Chadwick]

My hon. Friend is quite right. Many of my constituents certainly would not say that Lloyds is by their side. That is why it comes down to the Government. They have to show that they are on the side of our constituents, not just of the big banks.

Ultimately, this is a question of political choice. The Government can choose to stand up for rural communities and those reliant on in-person banking—which is all of us—or they can continue to allow this managed decline. Right now, the choices being made are the wrong ones. Labour has chosen to keep the tax breaks handed to the big banks by the previous Conservative Government and hinge its economic strategy on appeasing those same banks. At the same time, it is asking the small, often family-run businesses on our high streets to shoulder more of the burden to raise revenue. While big banks are being rewarded, rural communities are being left behind and local businesses are being squeezed.

That is not fair, balanced or sustainable. We need a reform of banking hub criteria to reflect rural geography, a proactive provision of hubs before the last bank closes, guaranteed access to free-to-use ATMs, and stronger obligations on banks to maintain services in underserved areas. Without intervention, the current trajectory is clear: more closures, further exclusion and more communities left behind.

15:43

[Richard Fuller (North Bedfordshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Western. I join everyone in congratulating the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) on not only securing the debate but opening it so clearly. He laid out the particular issue in Penzance, but in doing so highlighted common concerns about bank closures. He raised some interesting questions in his excellent speech. I am sure the Minister will address them, but I will highlight a couple that I thought particularly interesting. The first was about the manner in which the closure was done—there was no consultation. He also talked about access to banking, not just to cash. The Minister will be aware that the Labour party had thoughts on that prior to the election; I do not want to prejudge the consultation, but I would be interested in her observations about that.

The hon. Member for St Ives has been joined by several other Members. The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (David Williams) made an important point, among many, about the communal role that banks have played historically, and the hon. Member for Tewkesbury (Cameron Thomas) mentioned the impact on town centres. Those two points highlight how central bank branches were to our country’s culture. The hon. Member for St Ives also talked about the buildings that once housed the recently closed banks. The withdrawal of bank branches not only strikes at the way financial services operate in this country, but says a lot about the type of country we are. I will come on to that point later.

In his intervention, my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) raised the issue of the criteria used in the selection of banking hubs. I would be interested to know whether the Minister is considering that. The hon. Member for Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch (Katrina Murray) talked about face-to-face banking, which goes to the nub of the matter: future trends in banking, an issue that I will raise in my own comments. The Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe (David Chadwick), made a wide-ranging speech and talked about how mobile banking must be dependable to be successful, as well as the availability of mobile networks.

I had an exceptionally brief ministerial career, part of which included introducing to the House of Commons the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023, which contained the provisions that provided for banking hubs. It might be helpful to share some of my own thinking, or the thinking of the Conservative Government at the time. Some comments have been made about the impact of closures. I share people’s concerns about that issue, but the Government of the day—the Labour Government, today—must take a view on whether they will work with trends in how financial services operate in this country. They must decide either to seek to mitigate the social consequences, which is the rightful role of Government, or to stand steadfast against such changes. Patently, the decision made by the then Conservative Government, which has been supported by this Labour Government, was to work with the grain of how financial services are moving. It is about facilitating that, as far as possible, while recognising the social disbenefits that can arise.

It is fair to say that when consultations were done at the time, which was during covid, accessibility to cash was the primary focus of concerns about the decline of branches. It is also fair to say that the provisions in the 2023 Act on the future accessibility of banking were not set in stone. It was clear that we were in a period of trend and change that would require further consultation and review on how it was working, and what further trends were occurring. The Opposition welcome the Government’s taking the opportunity to look at these issues again.

To give a sense of the pace of change—this has not been mentioned so far—in 2024, for the first time, cash accounted for less than 10% of payments in this country. We need to go back only eight years for it to be, by far, the No. 1 form of transaction in this country. For those Members who are old enough to remember them, cheques now account for only 0.2% of all payments, so there has been a significant change.

On the pace of change of bank branches, since January 2015 there have been 6,700 bank branch closures, according to Which? magazine. To put that into context, there are approximately 12,000 towns in the country, and about another 100 cities. That shows the significant withdrawal of physical premises across the country. The number of ATMs has also fallen by 40% since 2015.

On the plus side, we have largely seen an end to the long decline in post offices in this country. One of the benefits of our post office network was that post offices were present in many locations, although not all, and could provide aspects of the banking services that were important to people. The change to the trend for post offices is welcome. We want our post offices to continue to provide a broad range of services to local communities. Postmasters and postmistresses are often among the most trusted people in their community, and they can provide a range of services, but of course they do not necessarily have the same level of expertise in banking that one would find in a bank branch.

That takes me on to another point. This debate was starting to look like a bit of a hit-job on Lloyds bank. I think that it was just by chance that the first three bank closures referred to were all of Lloyds branches, so let me say that this is not just a Lloyds thing; it affects all financial institutions. On the other hand, our financial institutions and banks do a very good job for people. They are effective in making sure that people have a safe place for their money and that money can be transferred from A to B. They are good at developing new products and at trying to adapt to technological change.

[David Chadwick]

The hon. Member says that banks do a very good job. Is he not aware of the numerous outages that Lloyds has had on its banking apps over the past couple of years and indeed the past couple of weeks? Those outages create a reliance on physical infrastructure for people to access cash if they need to.

Does the hon. Member also agree that the banks can afford to pay for banking hubs? It is not the Government who should have to pay for them. Does he agree that banks have more than enough to cover the cost of these hubs?

[Richard Fuller]

I have to say to my Liberal Democrat friend that the Liberal Democrats’ position is that taxing big businesses, big banks and big tech can pay for everything. I think I have heard the moneys from that being allocated to well over 20 different applications. That may have a role—it is up to the Liberal Democrats to say—but the key point I was making is that, whether we like it or not, a vast number of the things we do are moving from analogue to digital, and banking is not isolated from that. Look at the way in which people communicate, the way in which legal services are likely to change and the way in which public services are likely to be delivered. The role of Government, back in 2022-23, was either to put up a block against that or to facilitate the change. We said that we would facilitate the change.

There are contributions made through the banks to fund the banking hubs. More broadly, on the major transition of banking into the digital age, I take the hon. Member’s points about outage concerns and about someone receiving £1 million in their bank account and wondering how it got there, but overall the transition by financial services in this country has been done very well. It is important, though, that the Government of the day recognise the importance of maintaining essential banking services as a foundation for public confidence in the sector.

The issue of footfall is crucial, as is the point about being able to talk to a person. I recently went into a bank to withdraw some cash—not a huge amount, but a fair amount. I was asked, “Why are you taking your money out?” That might seem a rather intrusive question—I was going to say, “I’m putting it all on red in Las Vegas,” although I was not, obviously—but the reason for asking the question relates to a serious point that the hon. Member for Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch made. One issue that, back in 2022-23, I did not anticipate becoming so significant was how sinister online fraud on vulnerable people would become. With just a phone conversation, people can be intimidated or forced into thinking that they have to take money out of their account, and it ends up in criminal hands.

Online fraud is an evil crime, and it can affect anyone. It is a very sophisticated way to get to people who feel vulnerable. The best defence against it is the fact of having to go into a branch of a bank or financial institution and have someone over the counter look you in the eye, see how you feel, and ask important questions to reassure themselves that you are not the victim of a crime. I take that very seriously; when I was looking at the issue a few years ago, I was perhaps not as cognisant of it as I am now. I would be interested in the Minister’s thoughts.

Notwithstanding certain disagreements about the overall role of banks, this has been a debate in which all sides have urged the Minister and the Government to look at the update and the consultation in a serious way, think about what has been done correctly and see what, in today’s world, are the best changes to be made to the regulations.

15:55

[The Economic Secretary to the Treasury (Lucy Rigby)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Western. I congratulate the hon. Member for St Ives (Andrew George) on securing this debate. I thank him for setting out the concerns of his constituents very well, and I thank other hon. Members for their contributions: they have been powerful and in some cases very heartfelt.

It is fair to say that access to banking continues to attract significant interest from colleagues across the House. The hon. Member is right that that interest is increasing. He referred to his own experience of the trajectory of this issue, and I agree: I am seeing hon. Members raising this issue in the House with increased salience, which I am sure reflects how our constituents feel. I am grateful to all hon. Members who have taken the time to share their experiences and those of their constituents.

Some hon. Members who spoke in this debate have attended my banking hub surgeries, which I hope the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe (David Chadwick), found valuable. The fact that I hold those surgeries, which Members of Parliament from any party can attend, demonstrates that the issue is being raised more and more by Members across the House.

I recognise that rural and coastal communities such as those in the constituencies of the hon. Member for St Ives and of the hon. and gallant Member for Tewkesbury (Cameron Thomas) face particular challenges in accessing banking services. I very much appreciate the fact that in many circumstances local geography and transport may make it more difficult for elderly and disabled people, as well as those who are vulnerable or digitally excluded, to reach face-to-face banking when branch provision changes locally.

The hon. Member for St Ives mentioned services in his constituency being provided in an upstairs setting. I will come on to address accessibility issues, but I was sorry to hear that example. On transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Chris Bloore) raised concerns about travel times, which I will also address. Many points have been raised, and I will do my level best to address them all.

The Opposition spokesman, the hon. Member for North Bedfordshire (Richard Fuller), rightly referred to the fact that the banking landscape has changed in recent years. Many people have greatly benefited from digital innovations that allow them to manage their finances more easily. For many, those changes have increased accessibility and convenience. Many of us are able to access banking services just from an app on a phone. It has been clear in this debate, however, that although digital services work well for many people, others still want, need or prefer to access banking in person or use cash in their daily lives. That includes some older customers, people who are more vulnerable, or those—as with the family member of my hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch (Katrina Murray)—who have been through a significant life event. Being vulnerable at that point, they may just want to speak to another human.

This Government are on the side of each of those categories of people. We recognise that cash remains important for people and businesses right across the country. That is why we have been clear that, alongside digital innovation, it is critical that people have access to the services that they need. Hon. Members know that access to cash is protected in legislation and the FCA has responsibility and powers to ensure that people and businesses can continue to withdraw and deposit cash.

I want to address the serious concerns that have been raised by hon. Members about the impact of bank branch closures on our communities. In particular, the hon. Member for St Ives articulated his concerns about the closure of a Lloyds branch in Penzance. I fully understand his concerns about that situation. The Government understand the importance of those services, and there are other similar instances across the country. Banking services and other services must reflect customer and community interest.

I welcome the fact that some banks have made commitments to maintaining or improving their existing branches, because they recognise just how important they are to their customers. Nationwide Building Society has committed to maintaining 605 branches until at least 2030 and HSBC UK has committed to keeping 327 branches open until at least 2027; we very much welcome those important commitments. I also draw attention to the fact that, according to the Building Societies Association, 35% of the branch network is currently provided by building societies. As a Government, we fully support and value the role that mutuals play in our economy and society.

Branch access is an important feature for a number of customers. Many have used the free current account switching service to change provider. The switching service ensures that all payments and balances are automatically transferred to a new account, but for those firms that are changing their branch network, there are rules and obligations. In those circumstances, it is important that all Members know that decisions to close branches must be taken with regard to their impact on customers and communities. The FCA’s branch closure guidance is very clear that firms must carefully assess the effect of a planned closure on customers’ everyday banking and cash access needs.

Let me underline that point: it is very important, not least because of some of the contributions to today’s debate. Banks are expected to put appropriate alternatives in place. Where they fall short of those expectations, the FCA can and will ask for closures to be paused and I fully support those FCA powers. As a Government, we expect the FCA to use them where they consider it necessary to do so. Crucially, we also believe it is right that no branch can close until any recommended services are put in place.

[Andrew George]

At the end of the day, the issue is that the FCA and Link primarily undertake an assessment of access to cash, and not to the full range of banking services. The Minister says that adequate alternatives are in place. Of course, the banks will no doubt attempt to put some facade in place to satisfy that requirement—as she notes, I am unimpressed by the case in Penzance—but fundamentally, the test is access to cash, and that is insufficient. Surely that measure needs to be significantly widened.

[Lucy Rigby]

I appreciate that there is a difference between access to cash and access to banking services; I will come on to the latter, if the hon. Member will give me a moment.

The Government wholeheartedly recognise the importance of banking services to local communities; that recognition underpins our manifesto commitment to support industry to roll out 350 banking hubs across this country by the end of this Parliament. I think I am right to say that the hon. Member attended the opening of a banking hub in Helston in his constituency.

[Andrew George]

I did.

[Lucy Rigby]

It is always welcome when Members attend such openings. The hon. Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) is no longer in his place, but I was pleased to hear him welcome the upcoming opening of the banking hub in Ilkley. I note what he says about the need for a hub in Keighley as well.

[David Chadwick]

Mine is the biggest constituency in England and Wales, and four or five towns in it sorely need a banking hub: Brecon and Presteigne are two such examples, beyond the hub that has already opened in Ystradgynlais. Does the Minister agree that there is a need for more than the 350 hubs that the Government have already committed to?

[Lucy Rigby]

The hon. Member has tried to trick me into saying the name of his constituency or the towns in it before; as he well knows, I cannot pronounce them anywhere near as well as he can. I was about to answer the exact point that he makes. It is really important to note that the 350 figure is a floor, not a ceiling. Our manifesto commitment sets that floor of 350 hubs. I appreciate that the hon. Member is not asking me to call it right now, but I will: the Government, working with industry, hope to go above that number. That is not least because more than 270 hubs have already been announced. Our commitment is for 350 hubs over the course of this Parliament, and 18 months into the Parliament we are already at 270—hon. Members will see the trajectory. Of the 270 hubs that have been announced, 225 are now open. The remaining hubs that have been committed to are yet to open, but we expect them to in due course. To answer the hon. Member’s question, it is entirely possible that the 350 target will be surpassed, as and when more communities need banking hubs. I would welcome that, it sounds like he would welcome it and I am sure that other Members across the House would too.

Banking hubs provide assisted cash services through post office counters alongside community bankers from individual banks who meet customers face to face in a private room to offer support, as they would in a traditional branch, as has been mentioned. I was very sorry to hear the experiences with community bankers noted by the hon. Member for St Ives; that was not what I understood from colleagues in this place and what I have heard anecdotally outside this place. Indeed, when I visited the banking hub in Warwick in your constituency, Mr Western, I did not see queues of people waiting to see a community banker. Everything was happening in an orderly way, and community bankers could see people in a timely fashion. Nevertheless, I note the experiences that the hon. Member put on the record, and I am more than happy to look specifically at the issues in that banking hub.

[Andrew George]

I want to make sure that the Minister understands that I was simply describing what the community banker working on behalf of Lloyds was providing. I was referring to the Lloyds replacement for the closed branch, not a banking hub.

[Matt Western (in the Chair)]

I remind the hon. Member that he will have time to wind up at the end. Perhaps the Minister could start to conclude her remarks.

[Lucy Rigby]

On that cue, I will skip further ahead in my speech. I was going to talk about all the services that are available at banking hubs, which the industry is working hard to increase. Customers can now open accounts, change names and addresses, register complaints or receive help with online and telephone banking. I have met the industry on a number of occasions and I would like to put on record that we are working to try and make sure that the services provided at banking hubs meet the needs of communities. Fraud and scams were mentioned; they are concerns that the Government are thinking about.

Let me cut to the chase and answer many of the questions that have been raised. Despite everything that I have said about the importance of banking hubs and our manifesto commitment to open 350 of them, it would be premature to conclude that all communities are consistently receiving sufficient support for their banking needs. That has been clear from the contributions of hon. Members in this debate. In direct response to one question was raised by the hon. Member for St Ives—a point that was also well articulated by my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (David Williams)—that is why, as might be expected, we are keeping any need to go further, including on access to banking services, under close review.

There is much more I could say about the health of our high streets, digital and financial inclusion, and alternative options to banking services, but in the light of the time and your strong cue, Mr Western, I will wrap up there.

16:12

[Andrew George]

We have had a good debate and I am pleased that the Backbench Business Committee has permitted us to have it. It is clear that although we have aired so many of the issues today, there are still matters to be resolved. The Minister has helpfully addressed the Government’s position on the points that I raised at the beginning of the debate. Some should be part of an ongoing dialogue with Members who have been affected by the significant changes in banking services over the last decade and are therefore conversant with the impact it is having on constituents.

The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (David Williams) strongly and articulately argued the case for improved services in his constituency. My hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Cameron Thomas) did the same. Their examples illustrate that much more work is needed to improve accessibility to banking services, particularly for the most vulnerable and the digitally excluded.

[David Williams]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Andrew George]

I do not know whether that is permitted or not, but I will if the Chair allows it.

[Matt Western (in the Chair)]

Very briefly. I would not normally allow this.

[David Williams]

My point is about the focus on vulnerable customers: it is not only about vulnerable customers; it is about older people. My mum and dad would not be described as vulnerable. I bought them a smartphone last year, and I spent weekend after weekend trying to get them to use it. When their bank closed, they were offered half an hour with the bank on how to use apps. Would the hon. Member agree that that is not going to work, and that banks need to do more to help older residents?

[Matt Western (in the Chair)]

I remind Members that this is the summing up by the Member in charge, not an open debate.

[Andrew George]

I do not wish to reopen the debate. I have no summed up a debate before so I was uncertain about the procedure; thank you, Mr Western, for your advice. I will not accept any further interventions and will bring my remarks to a close as soon as I can.

The hon. Member for Cumbernauld and Kirkintilloch (Katrina Murray) made a telling contribution talking about the impact the situation is having on customers seeking support from banks. Very often, the banks have designed centralised systems for the convenience of the banks themselves, rather than for the customers. They seem to be retreating behind the digital and electronic walls of the bank, and not making themselves available to offer advice to people who really want to be able to eyeball people and see them face to face to get those services.

Fundamentally, my hon. Friend the Member for Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe (David Chadwick) illustrated how what is going on epitomises the widening inequality in this country. A chief executive of a bank runs off with £17 million. The big banks are creaming it on the back of the massive tax advantage that they have in these circumstances. On the other hand, the poorest in our society have been pushed out from these banks, and it has been made significantly more difficult for them to get access to banking services and support.

The issue epitomises the widening inequality in society and people’s digital exclusion. That is why I hope that a Labour Government, working with Liberal Democrats who share the same values, would address these issues, and not simply allow the banks to get away with what I consider to be blue murder. I am grateful to the Minister, and I hope that the conversation can continue.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the accessibility of banking services.

16:16

Sitting adjourned.